RFI Musique: How would you describe dEUS’s interior garden?
Tom Barman: Oh, I don’t know. There’s very little nature in dEUS actually. There are only streets, noise, bars and some old Peugeot bangers from the seventies (laughs).

Constant Now Deus Keep You Close (Pias) 2011 Listen

That’s where your music came from. How do you get back down to work after writing records like Worst Case Scenario (1993) or The Ideal Crash (1999), which were cult independent rock albums in the nineties?
When we get down to an album, we’ve probably got the previous one on our minds, but we don’t worry about the rest of it, it’s part of the past. Of course, you accumulate baggage, and it can be heavy. The trick is to try and avoid the baggage and keep your eye on the ball. When I’m doing something, it’s all I think about, I empty out, it’s like losing 20 kilos. If you don’t do that, then you tend to repeat yourself and you’re cynical.

For dEUS, then, there’s no one way to write songs. How did Keep you close come together?
Right from the start, things have been chaotic for us (laughter) but this time I said to myself, "We’ll do the next album together." So the five of us started playing together right after the last tour. It’s an approach that takes time, and you need access to a studio because there are some weeks where nothing comes up. But it was important to do it together: I see it as a consolidating album because we’ve had the same line-up for seven years now.  

Does that mean that your role as dEUS’s leader and songwriter has changed?
Like I said to the group a few weeks ago: “Next time, I don’t want to have to write another dEUS track.” (laughter) The first few months I just listened. From time to time, I went to the studio a bit and played guitar. I was really looking for tunes to sing, and that’s how we slowly started to put the tracks together. This is a dense CD, there are nine songs, forty-three minutes of music, but we had a lot more tracks: we chose the ones that were the most characteristic of the dEUS people know now, the rest of them will come out on EPs and other formats. This summer we tested out the album in festivals and we could see that the songs worked well live.

But the album is actually quite orchestrated...
It’s true, we chose to turn down the volume and we had a more analogical approach. Maybe it’s not so good for playing on the radio, but we were after a warmer, mellower sound. When you do an album, it’s really close to your life, it’s an immediate reaction to what’s going on.

A LIRE Site de dEUS

The vocals don’t take up quite the same place as before either. You’ve used a lot of backing singers and your voice sounds more polished …
Well, yeah, I’m a real fan of backing singers. I get that from my favourite jazz records, by Max Roach, Donald Byrd and Charlie Parker. I love really simple tunes sung by six, seven or eight people. As to my singing, I hope that it’s changed. Because it’s not an easy disk to sing, I’m going to take singing lessons for the first time in my life. Because I still smoke and I like drinking beer, I need to start being careful. Having said that, I don’t know if it’s the same for other singers, but I have a funny relationship with my voice: I never feel really sure about what it’s going to do.

Let’s go back to noise – do you still follow the rock scene in Antwerp?
No, that finished a long time ago. The Cartoon Bar (Ed’s note: rock venue in Antwerp where Tom Barman did the programming), which had this really vibrant scene in the nineties, collapsed in 2000. Now everything’s regular, regulated, it’s crap. All the great little bars closed down because they had trouble with the neighbours and the cops. Just about everywhere in Europe, they’re destroying town centres with too many regulations. But getting back to Antwerp: I’m not part of the new generation at all, which is much more rave and electro, because I’m always on tour or in the studio. I split my time between Belgium and Portugal.

How would you sum up Keep you close?
Take a look at the cover. It says it all with no words.  

Deus Keep you close (Pias) 2011